PSYC2040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Realistic Conflict Theory, Stereotype Threat, Group Conflict
17 Jun 2018
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PSYC2040 NOTES
COLOUR KEY
Key definitions
Functions, processes and components
Important points
Lecture 9 - Stereotyping and Prejudice
Stereotyping and prejudice
●Stereotypes
○Beliefs held about a group
○May or may not support prejudice - a stereotype can be disproved but prejudice
may still remain
●Prejudice
○Negative feelings towards someone based on group membership
Some origins of stereotypes
●Cognitive
○Motivational - ego threat
○Categorisation
■Allows us to go beyond information given
■Mutable vs immutable
●Some categories are conscious and chosen e.g. style of dress
●Some are not e.g. gender
○Kernel of truth to many stereotypes
●Societal
○Group conflict
■Study: Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment - boys at summer camp were
split into two groups and prompted to build hostility
●At the end of the procedure a shared problem (superordinate
goal) that they had to work together to overcome removed the
hostility
■We generalise people to the group level
●When someone in our group is hurt, we retaliate against the
group that hurt us
●Case study: in a case of police brutality where the police officers
got off not-guilty, riots in California involved individuals who
were in the same group but not the actual perpetrators
○Norms
○Media
■The internet plays a role in making hate crimes more acceptable
●Prejudice is decreasing but the accessibility of the internet not
only makes it easier for individuals to find like-minded others but
gives them the misconception that their beliefs are more widely
shared than they are, in turn normalising their behaviour
■Face-ism - the more of the face is seen in the picture, the more powerful
they seem
●Study: It was found that women had a lower face-ism score than
men in media, with more images of their full bodies than men
○This inadvertently perpetuates unconscious stereotypes
that women are less powerful than men
Study: when is a wallet a gun?
●Participants, both civilians and police officers, went through a computer simulation with
African-American or Caucasian-American targets holding a gun or another black object
e.g. mobile phone or wallet
●They had to quickly make the decision to shoot or not shoot and their reaction times
were measured
●Participants were quicker to shoot correctly and slower to correctly decide not to shoot
when the target was African-American
Unconscious prejudice
●We may rely on stereotypes even when we feel like we’re not
●Study: Facial features and the death penalty
○Historic records on African-Americans who committed crimes punishable by
death showed that when both defendant and victim were African-American
having stereotypically black features made no difference in the likelihood of
receiving a death sentence
○However, when the victims were white, looking more stereotypically black
increased the likelihood of the death penalty
●Whiteness and use of police force
○Study: police used less force when apprehending individuals who looked more
stereotypically white
●Babyfaceness and male leaders
○In white males, election results can be predicted with up to 75% accuracy based
on how babyfaced the candidates look
○In black males, babyfaceness acts as disarming mechanisms, mitigating
perceived threat by increasing perceptions of warmth, humility, similarity or
deference
Document Summary
May or may not support prejudice - a stereotype can be disproved but prejudice. Negative feelings towards someone based on group membership. Allows us to go beyond information given. Some categories are conscious and chosen e. g. style of dress. Study: sherif"s robbers cave experiment - boys at summer camp were split into two groups and prompted to build hostility. At the end of the procedure a shared problem (superordinate goal) that they had to work together to overcome removed the hostility. We generalise people to the group level. When someone in our group is hurt, we retaliate against the group that hurt us. Case study: in a case of police brutality where the police officers got off not-guilty, riots in california involved individuals who were in the same group but not the actual perpetrators. The internet plays a role in making hate crimes more acceptable. Face-ism - the more of the face is seen in the picture, the more powerful.
